The Pentagon posted footage of the Aegis Cruiser Lake Erie shooting down our dying spy satellite. It's really cool. They need to hire that cameraman for sporting events... :biggrin: http://www.breitbart.tv/html/50894.html
I love the terminology. First time I've heard "intercept" used to describe blowing something up with a missile. I wish Tom Brady was intercepted.
Man, I'd like to see just a snapshot of the physics/engineering calculations to make a "shot" like that. Good stuff!
I don't think there were any calculations involved. If the guidance is like that of teh CIWS, then it is more of an error correction that takes into account the missile's current position in relation to the assigned target. The guidance controls make corrections to trajectory, and then another sample of relative position to the target is taken, and then corrections are made based off that info. This happens thousands of times per second until the missile makes contact with the target. If it is beam guided, then they likely phase the SPY1b to aim a beam at the target and the missile makes it's corrections based on how far off the beam it is.
I'm sure you know what I'm about to say but... He means that there were no ground-based calculations to figure out the trajectory of the satellite, the rotation of the earth, the location, speed and heading of the launch platform, the acceleration of the missile, the atmospheric conditions at all levels of the missile flight, yadda yadda yadda... moon landing stuff. All they had to figure out was roughly where the satellite was and point the missile in that direction. The Missile's guidance package took care of the rest. But you knew that.
I guess that was my original point. Lotsa complicated stuff going on in the background for the missile guidance system to function correctly.
Maybe I'm a giant nerd, but I think it's incredibly cool. To time a missile to hit a orbiting satellite's fuel tank perfectly is pretty cool imo. But if it's like you say, and it's pretty much just pressing a button, it's not as cool anymore.
We got everything right to take down the satellite. Too bad we had a failure in keeping it up there, eh? Oh well, at least we were able to "fix" it. I suppose it was more a technical problem than a calculation, though.
